#it also means that percy and i were born the same year now (2005)

[ace-fandom-dumbass]

reading the new percy jackson book and the timeline of the series has to have officially shifted, which means if my maths is right (and i'm pretty sure it is) percy's new birth year (books) is the same year the first book came out

[just-another-obsessed-fangirl]

OKAY I JUST FINISHED CHALICE OF THE GODS IN ABOUT 3 HOURS AND IVE HAD A SLIGHT REVELATION

[slight Chalice of the Gods spoilers, but I don't think it's that relevant to the plot at large]

So, in The Lightning Thief, Sally tells Percy that she and his dad were only together for a summer, and he left before he was born, but that he knew that Sally was pregnant.

Photographs of Textual Evidence:

In The Last Olympian, we find out that Percy's exact birthday is August 18th.

Now. I don't know if it was just me. But I had figured that Rick meant that the summer Sally and Poseidon had their torrid love affair was the same year Percy was born - for the sake of this post, let's say 1992, based off the idea that the setting starts the same year the first book TLT came out, which is 2005, and he is 12 in June of that year, meaning he turned 13 in August 2005, ergo Percy Jackson was born in 1992 (let's ignore other timeline discrepancies and pop culture references in the books for now)

If we are being generous and include May as part of the summer, and say that is when Sally and Poseidon met and she immediately got pregnant at the start, that would still mean she was only about 4 months pregnant when she had Percy in August.

And I accepted that. I accepted that this was probably a Bella-in-Twilight-accelerated-pregnancy situation. I didn't think Rick intentionally meant to write it that way, but it felt like a canon-typical explanation. By the time we know for sure that Percy's birthday is in August, we find out that Annabeth and all the other children of Athena are born from Athena's divine thoughts after meeting the minds of incredibly intelligent mortals, and those children appear in a golden cradle on their mortal parent's doorstep. The idea that getting pregnant by a god could lead to pregnancy that takes half the time and still leads to a fully viable baby being born is not wilder than that. And I had already accepted that.

But in Chalice of the Gods, Sally says that Percy came much later than expected.

Photographs of Textual Evidence:

So.

Instead of Sally conceiving Percy in May 1992 and him being born in August 1992, Sally could've conceived Percy as late as September 1991 and he was born in August 1992, a pregnancy lasting a minimum of 11 months, but more likely lasting at least A FULL CALENDAR YEAR!?!?!?!? THIS IS CANON

And this is not wilder than if it really was an accelerated pregnancy situation, considering the canon. It might actually be more realistic. I've heard stories of human babies taking longer than 9 months to get out and they're alright, and I might not have had enough interest in them to check out if they were true or not, but I cannot even think of a story of someone seriously claiming they had a completely healthy and viable baby after only a trimester of pregnancy done. But it is just the opposite direction of what I had assumed and now I can't stop thinking about it. And now I'm also debating in my head whether an accelerated pregnancy or being pregnant for over a year would be scarier.

[that-queer-blob]

Agreed. Though I am a bit happy that they didn't drag adhd and dyslexia explicitly into the show?

(woops, this got... long. none of this was said against you, op, i agree with your post that making the show deal with ableism against schizophrenia but doing that by making mist-hidden monsters stand-ins for hallucinations or delusions is not the move the writers thought it was, and, in my opinion, that crude and forced comparison between those things is really similar to how RR tried to represent ADHD and dyslexia in the books whilst also claiming that they were basically superpowers to demigods with the only apparent downsides being forgetting things occasionally, not being able to sit still, and having trouble spelling things. there's a lot more to these disabilities that the people trying to write them don't know and it shows.)

For 2005, PJO was good, in the intent to show that ADHD and dyslexia weren't just made up to excuse laziness or something someone chose to have and rather than simply being born that way. But that's where the good kinda ends. RR basically just took his son's symptoms and slapped them onto every single demigod (except for Frank for some reason) and called it a day.

Any level of research into ADHD or dyslexia will tell you that that's not how that works, and then you still have to deal with the fact that it's not really affecting the characters at all. (I am NOT talking about the stupid demigod power thing. Mental disabilities do not give people superpowers). We occasionally get a reminder of "oh, I have adhd so I can't sit still and I lose pencils a lot" or "I can't read that sign" or whatever but it's always done in passing. It doesn't have a lasting effect at all on these characters.

And going back to the whole superpower thing, I rarely see anyone talk about how weird it is that this fandom talks about ADHD and dyslexia like they are actual powers. Read how they're described in the damn wiki:

If I removed the context of PJO from this, would you think that these descriptions were a dead-ringer for ADHD and dyslexia? (Also, large aside, the fuck do you mean "divine ancient greek" and "mortal languages"? What the fuck do you think the Ancient Greeks spoke? Are they not mortals anymore or something?)

I truly think that it would have been better to remove the characters being ADHD and dyslexic from them being demigods. If something were written now that had to excuse including mental disability by intrinsically linking it to that character being supernatural or divine in nature, I would not be surprised to see people calling it out. I don't see why we shouldn't with something that is still in the media zeitgeist, even if it was written nearly 19 years ago.

And that isn't nearly everything. I could write freaking essays about this. Why is it that every demigod (except Frank for whatever the fuck reason) knows that they have ADHD and dyslexia? How did they get diagnosed? Percy knew before he knew he was a demigod yes, but that's not going to be the same for every demigod, especially AFAB demigods during the 2000s and 2010s. Why the hell did RR think it was okay to say "oh medicine is bad and monsters are the ones who try to force them on you to get rid of your superpowers" in the first few chapters of the freaking first book? And why the hell does Frank, despite everyone claiming before that every demigod has fucking ADHD and dyslexia not have fucking ADHD and dyslexia??? And why the hell did RR think that it was okay to follow up with him saying "wow, adhd and dyslexia is so cool, i wish i had them!"

I would slam my head against a wall if I didn't have a headache already from this.

Things i hate about the PJO show

I bet you thought this was gonna be a joke about how i love this show and actually don't hate it.

But i want to murder whoever did lightning. Why is the only thing i can see of Annabeth her jacket and not her face? And Grover just isn't there Like it's not even racism cause half of the time you can't see Percy.

Also is it schizo rep instead of dyslexic adhd rep now? because if so, it's a very interesting stance. I.e. like it shows the problems with ableism that people with schizophrenia face. But at the same time, you know making the demigods see things that are "really" there but people don't believe them, is ... iffy

[takaraphoenix]

Is it me or are riordans books lsoong it’s charm? I mean I like the idea of different stories told by other prospective and other mythology but when is you keep making sequels and spin offs over and over and not just end it it loses its fun. Also didn’t rick kill of Jason?

I mean, you’re talking to the girl who abandoned the books after HoO due to a loss of quality and also… for the ridiculousness of cramming all the mythologies together.

I stand by the fact that TKC didn’t do as well as hoped and that’s the only reason he tied it to his big property. To make more money. There is literally no other reason than CHASE being highly recognizable among the PJO fandom, that’s the only reason Magnus was Annabeth’s cousin.

If he’d kept all of those vastly different series separate, that might be a different tune. But he knows Percy is his money-maker so he forces Percy into everything else to effectively make the PJO readers also read his other work.

That’s the reason why we’re on sequel number two for the PJO series and why TKC turned out to be in the same world and why Magnus had to be Annabeth’s cousin. Whatever he’s gonna do with the Celtic gods - and let’s be real that is 100% where he’s going to go next now that he went through the three biggest pantheons - Percy is definitely going to find his way into that too.

It’s just… frustrating because this greed just… made his world completely fall apart.

If all the gods operated on the same rules, I’d buy it all being one world, but how he mashed them together…?

But his “they moved on and changed into Roman” completely falls apart considering the ““Greek”“ gods we met in PJO, because by that logic, these were not the Greek gods, they were the American gods - Poseidon in a Hawaiian shirt, Zeus in a suit, Hades owning a record label. They moved on and adjusted according to the new worshippers. But somehow those American gods are treated like the Greek gods, while the Roman aspects are just 100% old-fashioned proper Roman.

No. No, either you say Greek and Romans both live in modern US and have them proper!Roman and then also proper!Greek, or you say they move on to a new place of worship and change accordingly… and thus remove the existence of “Roman” demigods in the US, because effectively there would be neither Greek nor Roman demigods there since the gods as a whole moved on and evolved into a new American aspect - which was what I had assumed happened prior to him retconning Romans in and making the whole thing make zero sense.

Not to mention, what? Will Magnus Chase then get a spin-off where he has to fight a civil war against the Germanic gods? Aka, the other aspect of the Norse gods? Wodan and Donar and company??

Also, you know, just how fucking forced it is to have the two Great Prophecies that have been laying around for millennia… just take place half a year apart. It’s bullshit. If he had tackled that second prophecy with a full new set of demigods in the future, yeah sure. But he had to make it about Percy too, because as mentioned above, Percy is what makes money.

Look, I’m not saying it couldn’t work to have all pantheons be real. But the way he does it is forced and not very thought through. So literally every single pantheon moved to the US, huh? What’s Europe, dirt under your fingernails? We are most definitely not doing shitty enough to be treated that way. Why would our gods move to the US? All of them? Why would the Egyptian gods be moving all the way up there? It’s… It’s started being really fucking offensive, to be quite frank.

The way he did it with the Greeks, with only one pantheon that also accordingly adjusted to being American, it was an interesting concept. It was also 2005.

In the past 15 years, the world’s view on the US has shifted drastically. They are most certainly not the center of the world or in any way or shape a symbol of progressiveness and the place where all the gods would move. It’s incredible narcissistic and it is also incredibly rude.

Because, at its base, what he’s doing is stealing from other cultures. Oh, sure, after the Egyptian gods he stopped taking gods from POC. But… uhm… I know this site doesn’t like to hear that but white people have culture too? Those ancient gods are part of a culture, whatever the fuck the primary skin-color of the people of that culture are. And to just rip those gods and myths out of that culture and forcing them into America, completely removing them from their actual cultural background, is in fact cringeworthy at this point.

If you take one, it’s still all fun and games somehow and hey it’s for the children and the theory of the gods moving on, it’s kind of intriguing.

But if you just keep stealing the gods from their country - and yes, considering he at this point goes out of his way to make it all take place in the US, that quite literally is stealing them out of their countries - then it’s really getting cringeworthy.

And yes, I know, overall this hellsite thinks white people don’t have culture and white people culture are American suburban soccer moms or whatever the fuck, but you gotta… you gotta look beyond America for a change. Every single country has its own, unique culture. Yes, even countries that are pre-dominantly white, even they have their own culture and history. And taking huge parts of any country’s cultural background, ripping it out and making it take place in your own backyard centric around your own people with absolute disregard of the country of origin, that’s… seriously, that is not really cool. Not even when you take it from white cultures.

If he’d at the very least would make an efford to make them take place in Europe too - I’m not even demanding each mythological series should take place in its country of origin (even though that, of course, would be ideal, seriously), he’s not even trying to bring Europe in on this.

When the Argo II went to Rome, there was nothing. Rome, literally the center where the Roman gods came from… but… no Roman camp. This would have been an ideal chance to show that his bullshit nonsense of ALL the gods can ONLY be met in the US and ALL demigods HAVE to move to the US is actually factually wrong. He could have introduced a Roman camp in Rome, have them get back-up from European demigods. That would have been his chance.

But no. Absolutely all of those gods completely moved to the US and left nothing behind in the countries that shaped them. Go to Rome. Walk through Rome. See all of the statues and fountains of the old gods, you can not tell me that if the Graeco-Roman gods were real, they would not also manifest there and they would not also have a camp there.

Especially considering Silena Beauregard was born in Paris, the gods very much go to Europe still apparently. But only to sire kids that their single parents then have to ship to the US because fuck Europe, am I right?

Look, I’m not saying he can’t work with the gods of other countries. I enjoy seeing interpretations of gods and I’m fully aware no one gives a rat’s ass who’s adapting mythologies from pre-dominantly white cultures, but I think that if you really do make a living only out of using other country’s mythologies, histories and their culture, then you sure as shit should also bring a basis level of respect toward that country, regardless of what country we are talking about.

He shows an extra amount of respect for other non-white cultures by not even touching them himself anymore and instead helping young authors from those countries show-case their own takes on a PJO-esque world - and that is absolutely amazing and really good him, honestly. Like, I genuinely think that’s a great thing to do from him and a good way for him to use both his fame as well as his white privileg, because let’s be real being a straight white man helps there a lot.

But the very least he could do about all those mythologies he keeps using would be to pay a baseline respect toward their cultures too and not forget that they too come from countries that he is not intimately familiar with, that they too are part of a culture and that he could, at the very fucking least, be respectful enough to them to not pretend that a Greek demigod born in fucking Greece would have to be shipped to New York because that’s where it’s at and where everything turned completely American centric. Like, that’s literally all I’m asking. Take into account that those gods came from somewhere and respect their origins and stop treating modern day Europe like it’s some garbage dump or something.

Well, that sure took a detour there. But then again, it really had to be said. Yes, a huge part of why this is losing it’s charm is because he keeps dragging new pantheons into this same world but under the same conditions of “America first, Europe, uh, never” and with every new mythology (and every time it moves closer toward the now), it becomes more and more cringeworthy and, for me as a European, also boring and unrealistic.

And yeah, he killed Jason. Because sure, we had the second Great Prophecy, what was supposed to be a huge-ass war but eh we’re fine with 9 demigods who should be 7 and literally no one of importance died in that world-changing war. But now in some supidass side-quest - yeah, I’m calling it as it is, Apollo getting deaged and them having shenannigans is in fact a side-quest because for fuck’s sake the two last series were each about a millennia old Great Prophecy and a giant (or titan, heh) war - the son of Zeus dies.

[psychotic-banana-overlord]

Tyrant’s tomb book review/rant

Bare with me, this is long and confusing but I can confirm it isn’t gospel is just my opinion so take it was a pinch of salt.

Okay so I just finished the tyrants tomb (after literal months of not finding the time) and like honestly I really really liked it. It’s prob the book I enjoyed most in the whole series and like I don’t get why people are hating on it. First of all, the stakes was super high Rick killed off a past main character in the previous book and so now you’re kind of left on the edge. Is he going to do it again? He was more than willing to kill off Jason why not anyone else from the 7. So when the whole scene of frank dying for 40 pages (yes I counted) I legit believed it. You can call me gullible but keep in mind this book is for nine year olds and that’s basically my mental age lol. So rick successfully (in my option) raised the stakes from the last book. Obviously I was heartbroken when it came to Jason’s death I legit cried my eyes out man this is a character I grew up with despite the fact that he wasn’t my favorite. But I didn’t like how his name was brought up at least fifty times. I didn’t count but my god rick how many times have you written the guys name and mentioned his death in a single book. I don’t think I’ve every seen his name being said this much even when he was a main character in hoo like boi. Also I didn’t think the book was paced properly? Idk if I’m using that term correctly but the first part of the book was pretty slow to me. It seemed like everyone was just kinda hanging around. I know they were preparing and stuff but it came off a little slow compared to the end of the book which was jam packed with action.

On the other hand this book feature my two favorite of the 7, my children hazel and frank. And my god FRANK. I absolutely loved him in this book. He was such a great leader and such a badass and somehow still such a cute little bean. Like I cannot tell you how much Ive grown to adore him now even more because of this book. HIS CONFIDENCE. The fact that he isn’t afraid to die and he fucking SAYS IT. He accepted his fate and accepted that he will most likely die and that’s that. Such an admirable character like I can’t put it into words how much I love him. And no he didn’t deserve to die. I’m sorry but people saying he should’ve died I respectively disagree. Firstly this is a children’s book (I get that they can be mature enough for death but) the last book was so sad. Like losing Jason was terrible and his funeral was heartbreaking killing off frank should not be the way to go. And to be honest I like the lessons we learn from this book. YES THERE ARE LESSONS. Firstly, we are not bound to our fate. That’s a GREAT lesson okay. And it’s proved with Franka and Reyna. Also, correct me if I’m wrong but Reyna was technically suppose to die in hoo cuz she tried to cover a bomb with her body but a goddess came and saved her. How is this not the same with frank? Legit there are so many points in the books where characters should’ve died realistically but didn’t. Those are accepted why is this one not? Honestly I hate when people decide that characters need to die for there to be stakes (I kno I mentioned that killing Jason did this but let me be for a sec) it doesn’t make sense to me. Why do you want someone you love to die? Call me immature but that ain’t fun. Life is already so sad why would I want my favorite characters that are literally immortalized in these books. Anyone born from 1992 to 2005 could like these books and relate the the characters. And they don’t feel like they’ve aged because they don’t age in these books. In these books they’ll forever be there and comfort us when we need them. Why do you INSIST on killing characters off. I’m sorry but in the Percy Jackson and the olympians series there were many character deaths but none of them hit me like Jason’s and I’m not sorry to say that I like it that way. I like reading books that comfort me instead of stress me out. And have happy endings. And that’s why I loved the tyrants tomb. Despite having some flaws it was overall a happy book. And I think that’s okay, you don’t have to have a depressing piece of writing to be good. For fucks sake. Okay rant over back to the book review.

So Reyna. My queen. I’m so happy with her stories ending. And I’m considering it the end of her story becuase it’s the beginning of a new life. I love the way rick has written her and anyone who disagrees can fight me. She’s another example of you choose your own fate in the book and I think that she’s a literal icon. I love the fact that she admits she felt like she’s forced to like some one and doesn’t really. And yes I think it’s great that she’s just friends with Thalia. The part she mentioned about people just being friends is GREAT (fight me). In real life I feel like Reyna is such a relatable character. I’ve had friends who have had boyfriends etc but I never had personally and so I always felt like I should force something with someone. I’d force a crush on someone when I didn’t really like them so I could relate to my friends in that way (I mean this was back in middle school but still relevant). And like Reyna realizing that you kno what I don’t need a man or a woman. I want to be me and I want to find out who me is. Like yes girl. Go find yourself. Live your life. She deserves to be a hunter goddamn it. Like she said she’s always been forced to be something or expected to and she just wants to be free. Rick did a good job in my opinion showing how stressed she was through out the book. I mean he didn’t need to but it worked and I’m grateful for her character.